Dr. Anthony Fauci Resignation: White House Chief Medical Adviser To Retire by the End of President Joe Biden's Term

The nation's top expert on infectious diseases, Anthony S. Fauci, who has been the face of the coronavirus pandemic response for more than two years, wants to retire before the end of President Joe Biden's term after serving in government for more than 50 years.

Politico was the first to report on Fauci's plan to retire by 2025. The 81-year-old official then gave the impression that his intentions were not finalized, telling the New York Times that he would "almost certainly" retire by 2025 and warning CNN not to take the news from Monday as an official declaration of his retirement.

Fauci Expected To Retire by End of Biden's Term

Fauci, who serves as President Joe Biden's chief medical adviser, began his career at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in 1968 as a clinical research fellow until taking over as director in 1984. In that capacity, he has counseled seven presidents during a variety of public health crises, such as HIV/AIDS, the 2001 anthrax attacks, Ebola, and Zika. However, in recent years, his advice on the coronavirus has made him a political lightning rod.

While Biden praised Fauci's decades of public service and named him his main medical adviser after winning the election, President Donald Trump openly insulted Fauci in 2020 and warned supporters that he would think about removing him. In his reaction to the pandemic, which has spread wildly across the nation despite the availability of vaccinations, Biden has mainly relied on Fauci. Since then, Fauci has stated that although the coronavirus is persistent the United States must pass a smaller threshold of illnesses in order to exit the pandemic stage, The Washington Post reported.

Because antibodies from vaccinations and prior coronavirus infections provide only sporadic protection against the most recent omicron subvariant, the BA.5 variant has grown to be prevalent in the United States and has proven particularly challenging to suppress.

The infectious-disease specialist has also started to raise concerns about the monkeypox outbreak, encouraging Americans to "take [it] seriously" on Saturday. Fauci has also been calling for further measures to depoliticize the public health sector.

GOP Looks Into Investigating Fauci

Republicans have previously pledged to look into Fauci during their midterm elections. Republicans in Congress have fought with Fauci over NIH grants going to a lab in the city where COVID-19 began on several occasions.

Per Daily Mail, Fauci complained about the possible lines of inquiry. Republicans will continue to target Fauci even if he retires, according to Rep. James Comer, ranking member on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. The NIH awarded EcoHealth Alliance a $3.3 million grant in 2014 to research bat coronaviruses. Of that, EcoHealth ultimately donated $600,00 to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Gain-of-function research is said to be conducted in the Wuhan lab at the core of the lab leak scenario for COVID-19's origins. In November 2019, three WIV researchers had COVID-19 symptoms and sought medical attention, supporting the idea that the virus was created in a lab.

Gain-of-function research, the contentious technique of raising a virus' transmissibility or lethality to investigate the emergence of new illnesses, was prohibited in 2014 by the administration of President Obama. The NIH overruled that decision three years later.

Fauci denied that his organization had ever funded gain-of-function studies. In reference to the early 2000s SARS outbreak, which is thought to have originated from bats in China, he defended the 'modest' collaboration with the Chinese lab in June, saying it would be "almost a dereliction of our duty if we didn't study this, and the only way you can study these things is you've got to go where the action is."

In the US, both the case and mortality rates are increasing as a result of BA.5's takeover. Infections per day have increased by 36% in the last week, to 145,761 per day. 528 more people die per day, a 23 percent rise.